Clearly feeling that much of their work passed unappreciated by the public and unrecorded in offical league tables, the exercise in transparency has helped change perceptions of the police more effectively and quickly than any boring spokesman or expensive advertising campaign could have hoped.

Inevitably pranksters were quick to set up false accounts such as @gmp24_7 which included hoax reports in the style of the GMP tweets.

The campaign has been heralded as a success though hasn’t been appreciated by everyone. In what Zeitgeist feels is a slightly shortsighted view that fails to understand both the purpose of the campaign and the effectiveness of the channel, Fiona McEvoy of the TaxPayers’ Alliance complained that,‘The police should be catching criminals, not wasting time on social websites.’